1.7: Mumbo-Jumbo (Solution)

The names are six sitcom characters (from "Perfect Strangers", "The
Simpsons", "Mad About You", "Seinfeld", "Red Dwarf", and "Will &
Grace"), and those little boxes are supposed to look like Scrabble
tiles with the letters missing.

On one episode of their respective sitcoms, the six characters each
tried to play a fake word in Scrabble. (In Scrabble competitions, an
intentionally played illegal word is called a "phony", so the last few
words of the introduction are a small hint.) If you spell these words
using a blank tile, and if someone then went out and removed all the
letters from the tiles, you'd get something like the bad ascii-art
pictures in the puzzle.

The words are:

MYPOS ("I didn't think it was a word either, but...")

KWYJIBO ("Uh... a big, dumb, balding North American ape.")

HING ("Hmm, it's hard to explain.")

QUONE ("To quone something.")

JOZXYQK ("It's the sound you get when you get your sexual organs
trapped in something: Jozxyqk!" "Is it in the dictionary?" "Well,
it could be. If you were reading in the nude and you closed the
book too quickly.")

SPRAMP ("Spramp your face? What the hell is that?")

Most teams found KWYJIBO to be the big lead-in. First, there aren't
many tiles worth five, four, or eight points in Scrabble, and trying
to sound out any of the pronouncable combinations will put you on the
right track. Second, KWYJIBO is arguably the most well-known of any
fake Scrabble words, appearing in such widespread places as the
Melissa virus source code.

The middle four words are all easily found with a web search for the
name of the sitcom and the word SCRABBLE, pretty much. Scripts or
"Did You Know?" trivia pages are plentiful.

The first word comes from an early episode of "Perfect Strangers",
from before the blondes downstairs have met Balki; they, like Larry,
didn't even know Mypos was a country before they met Balki and
challenge Larry when he plays it. As far as we know, this information
could not be found on the web. We suspect that nobody has a complete
collection of "Perfect Strangers" on tape-- not even at eBay.
However, it's not an unreasonable guess, since MYPOS is closely
associated with the show and fits the scores on the tiles well.

When we wrote this puzzle, we couldn't find any pages with SPRAMP from
"Will & Grace". It seemed that the show had many fan pages, but
none that went into great detail. Much to our surprise, some teams
did find a copy of the script on-line (hidden in a frameset which most
search engines won't crawl through) and knew to look at that
particular script by reading plot synopses.

For people who expressed their surprise at the number of sitcoms that
used this gag, there are more shows that we didn't end up using.
"Friends", "Family Ties", and even "Scarecrow and Mrs. King" have had
fake words played. In "Dilbert", Dogbert spells QUIZZING... with no
blanks. Since this has become a sad hobby of mine now, let me know if
you know of any other words.